Upstream or downstream,
we are all fighting cancer
To the editor:
One day while walking along a river bank a woman saw a person struggling in the rapids, close to drowning. She quickly pulled the victim to safety only to see another person coming down the river and going under the water; she saved him too. Soon there were many more people coming down and struggling in the water and eventually the woman started to walk away.
One of the victims on shore asked her why she wasn’t helping these new victims. She replied that she was going to go upstream to find out why all of these people were ending up in the river and try to stop it from there.
This allegory is a common one used to describe different levels of intervention and prevention in areas of health care; social services and beyond. I believe it applies well to the recent debate in Aroostook County about different services and programs for cancer patients.
Members of the C-A-N-C-E-R group have been urging people to keep their fund-raising efforts local. They claim that donations to their group are directly helping our friends and neighbors here in The County while funds from Relay for Life that go to the American Cancer Society (ACS) leave the area and those services do not benefit us.
Although many patient services from the ACS actually are used by people here in Aroostook (I am a nine-year cancer survivor and I used their services); it is also important to note that our fund-raising efforts through Relay are supporting important research work aimed at ending cancer.
The ACS is the largest private, not-for-profit, nongovernmental funder of cancer research in the U.S. It takes an average of 20 years of supported research to bring a treatment to use by a patient and the ACS supports those advances. In its 100 years of existence ACS has funded research that has not only played a role in nearly every major cancer breakthrough; but also resulted in 46 Nobel Prize winners for these types of discoveries.
Let me give you a specific example. Dr. Shannon Stott and her colleagues recently developed the CTC-chip which is a micro chip that can identify cancer cells in patients with early diagnosis. When Dr. Stott started her research it was deemed too risky and did not receive federal funding. The ACS funded her early research and she later received federal funding because of the work completed with ACS support.
At Relay we celebrate survivors; remember victims; and perhaps most importantly fight back against this disease. We are going upstream to stop people from falling in the river; to create a world where our children will never hear those horrible three words “You have cancer.”
Local community groups like C-A-N-C-E-R provide equally important support in direct assistance to cancer patients. They are trying to pull people out of the river downstream. We certainly need to continue to do that as well.
I believe these two endeavors are complementary; cancer patients need all the support we can give them from as many different sources as possible. We must also work to create a world with more birthdays to reduce the number of cancer patients altogether. The Katahdin Area Support Group that apparently served as a model for the development of C-A-N-C-E-R actually works collaboratively with the Millinocket Relay for Life. I would like to see that happen here in The County; it does not serve anyone to fight with our neighbors over who is more deserving of our support.
Lisa Leduc
Presque Isle
